The incredible growth of the Internet has excited businesses and consumers alike with its promise of changing the way we live and work. However, a major concern has been just how secure the Internet is, especially when sending sensitive information.
The following information must be securely transmitted:
Credit-card information;
Social Security numbers;
Private correspondence;
Personal details;
Sensitive company information; and
Copyrighted media (e.g., sound recordings, videos, literary works, etc.)
Bank-account information.
Currently, information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods. A simple but straightforward security method is to only keep sensitive information on removable storage media like floppy disks. However, the most popular forms of security all rely on encryption, the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with a secret key can decode it.
Most computer encryption systems belong in one of two categories: Symmetric-key encryption; and Public-key encryption.
In symmetric-key encryption, each computer has a secret key (code) that it can use to encrypt a packet of information before it is sent over the network to another computer. Symmetric-key requires that you know which computers will be talking to each other so you can install the secret key on each one. Symmetric-key encryption is essentially the same as a secret code that each of the two computers must know in order to decode the information. The code provides the key to decoding the message.
Public-key encryption uses a combination of a private key and a public key. The private key is known only to your computer, while the public key is given by your computer to any computer that wants to communicate securely with it. To decode an encrypted message, a computer must use the public key, provided by the originating computer, and its own private key. A very popular public-key encryption utility is called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which allows one to encrypt almost anything.
Encryption methods in a wireless commercial application environment is performed by one of the above-identified methods. However, those methods provide limited capabilities of what an end user, someone who receives digital content at their cellular phone, for example, can do with the received digital content. Therefore, there exists a need to provide a secured digital content data transmission system that allows recipients some secure control over transmission of digital content. Insert background of the invention here.